An ever-increasing reliance on information and the computing systems that produce, process, distribute, and maintain such information in its various forms, continues to put great demands on techniques for providing information resources and access to those information resources. Many businesses and organizations have a need not only for a significant amount of computing resources, but also for those resources to be available with a minimal amount of downtime. One solution for such requirements is an environment in which computing resources are clustered together thereby providing a flexible, high-performance, and highly available platform to access shared data in a storage area network environment. A cluster-wide volume and file system configuration allows for simplified and centralized management. An additional benefit is the provision of an integrated cluster volume manager that presents every node in the cluster with the same logical view of the shared device configurations.
An advantage of a cluster environment is the ability to eliminate, or substantially reduce, single points of failure for the access of information. Every compute node in the cluster is provided with the same view of the shared data resources and can access those data resources in the same manner. Thus, if one or more of the computer resources suffers a failure, tasks being performed by the failed systems can be transferred to another compute node for further processing. In order to effectively provide for the elimination, or reduction, of single points of failure with regard to cluster resource management, management is distributed among the member nodes of the cluster.
When a cluster member leaves the cluster, provision must be made for distributing the resource management responsibilities of that node among the remaining cluster members. It is desirable that such redistribution of resource management responsibilities be performed in a manner that makes efficient use of cluster resources, such as computer cycles and network bandwidth. It is further desirable that such redistribution of resource management responsibilities take into account the relative capabilities of the remaining cluster members. It is also desirable that in the performance of redistribution of resource management responsibilities among the cluster members that movement of resource management responsibilities among the remaining nodes be minimized.